The present invention relates to a customized Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) to improve the efficacy of products in an organization. More particularly, the present invention provides a system and method for customizing a PLM to improve product effectiveness of a New Product Development (NPD) process.
New Product Development (NPD) is a process of bringing a new product or service to market and is considered to be the first stage of a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) process of an organization. Organizations use Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) packages for managing their New Product Development (NPD) process. Various PLM packages and third party Commercial-Of-The-Shelf (COTS) solutions exist in the market such as eMatrix, Enovia, Teamcenter, Windchill, SAP-PLM, and Agile PLM.
Organizations need to invest on an ongoing basis in NPD programs to improve profitability and market share through new products. Considerable investments are being made in engineering initiatives and systems such as PLM, Manufacturing Process Management (MPM), and Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES). However, product launch dates, development budgets and quality targets of above-mentioned programs are frequently missed due to design challenges, accelerated lifecycles, and complex supply chains. Studies have shown that over 80% of NPD programs fail at some level, thus resulting in product ineffectiveness in the organization.
NPD program failure occurs due to several reasons. Existing PLM packages do not provide a means to align engineering initiatives with organizational growth strategies through diagnostic assessment of NPD processes. In addition, PLM packages do not effectively integrate various product functions in a feedback loop to orchestrate product development. Also, PLM package solutions do not facilitate late changes in product design based on field performance aspect of new products released. Further, dynamic NPD go/kill/hold decisions are not taken based on Net Present Value (NPV) of product portfolio computed over the latest product cost or warranty cost.
Further, there is lack of an evaluation criteria attached to NPD stage-gate process to qualify new product ideas or specification changes for business feasibility. Customer needs are not effectively linked to NPD evaluation process and their requirements are not tracked for fulfillment. Organizations lack the ability to manage change through a responsive supply chain to provide control, visibility and predictability to product managers. Furthermore, existing PLM and COTS packages do not provide a holistic view into aspects such as eco-compliance needs and complex program synchronization. To summarize, disparate business processes, tools and practices across business units, lack of global engineering standardization, incomplete visibility, rework, reactive quality management and inefficient cost control results in failure of NPD programs despite heavy investments in PLM technologies and their customizations.
In light of the abovementioned disadvantages, there is a need for directional PLM solution based on diagnostic assessment to address product effectiveness challenge through an integrated and closed loop, cross-functional approach. Further, the PLM solution should manage the product effectively, linking each product function like customer needs, product portfolio planning, NPD program, and field performance management with a collaborative information backbone. The PLM solution should increase product value, reduce time-to-market, reduce product and operations costs, improve product reliability and increase customer satisfaction. In addition, the PLM solution should improve the efficacy of the NPD process and drive overall product effectiveness.